Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

It's true, Adie said. She gestured at their rhizome, proliferating into the distance. A chill seeped up her spine, spreading at the entrance to her brain. Do you remember the night the two of you showed me the Crayon World? Now look!

Oh Lord. Spiegel held his head. What have we done? We've taken a decent, law-abiding hater of technology…

Oh, I still hate technology. I'm just learning how to make it please me.

Adie's new pleasure drew Spider back with greater frequency. He checked up on the Jungle Room's smallest alterations, like a log house owner watching a neighbor put in a barbecue pit too close to the property line.

Go on, she encouraged him. Just head down that way a little. That opening to the left of the divan. Nah. I kind of like it out here.

Even after a dozen solo trips, he refused to leave the comfortable foyer of Rousseau for the expanses of the greater mansion. She… reminds you of someone? Who? he bluffed.

Adie smiled at him. Pointed at the pointing woman, recumbent on her berth. Spider made no sign. Someone from around here?

He turned to look at her. Through their two sets of 3-D glasses, she couldn't see his eyes. He looked away. Depends on what you mean by "here." Where were you born? she asked. He shrugged. You dont want to say?

He swung around, hard. Not a question of wanting. How old were you when… you came over? He turned away again. Young. She waited a decent interval. Adopted?

You know the odd thing? He spoke to the woman on the sofa. They say I have an older brother. Somewhere.

She came and put her arm around him, where he stood in the foliage. He took off his glasses, but would not look at Adie. I really wish you'd paint some clothes on her.

Ebesen paid a visit one day, when Adie had the Cavern. For the first time since their near-conversation, he reappeared, ready to talk. He checked up on her progress. She walked him through the moving animals, including the monkey he'd animated.

Were you aware that your innocent customs official-turned-naive painter once did time in La Sante prison? Ebesen spoke as though the crime were hers.

No! Impossible.

Yes indeed. Aiding and abetting a forgery and embezzlement scheme.

I cant believe it. Did he know what he was doing?

Probably not. You folks rarely do.

You folks? Me folks?

A surfeit of wide-eyed artistic trust. At least that's what the authorities concluded. They let him out after a month.

She took Ebesen down the paths into the scanned anthology. They passed by the Botticelli without comment. They skirted the Poussin. Ebesen showed nothing more than a twitch of recognition around the lips. He took the controls, steering them down the jungle track as if in an ATV. Soon he refused even to slow down at the passing wayside attractions.

They reached the far end of the simulation, where the unbordered world dropped off into white. Ebesen removed his glasses and nodded. Interesting.

That's it? That's all the critique I get?

Well, unless I missed it down a hidden fork somewhere, you've left out something obvious. Something essential.

No Dr. Tulp, she said. No Gross Clinic. I refuse to do anything where anyone's veins are outside their body.

Hands. Red handprints. Elk. Bison. Magic arrows.

Oh! Yes, of course! A glow infused her eyes, the idea of perfection. Cant have a Cavern exhibition without a little cave painting.

Ebesen didn't register. The bagman was lost in disputation with himself. When he spoke again, it wasn't to her. Huh. That's it. That's how you need to do this.

He walked out of the Cavern. She watched him leave. The seat of his sagging khaki pants had worn through in two moth-eyed spots on either side of the inseam. It stabbed at her. The battle for existence shrunk to a decent pair of trousers — one meager gift that she'd never be able to give the man without humiliating him.

Against all indication, Ebesen came back. He dragged with him a massive quarto volume, its spine long ago broken, its loose pages in various degrees of prison break. A venerable book with the smell of mold and water damage to authenticate it. A text that had hectored generations of students when Janson's unfocused eyes still baffled themselves on that print of The Peaceable Kingdom pasted above his crib.

Here, Ebesen said, cracking open the tome. All the plates were black-and-white. Or had been black-and-white once. They'd since all mildewed to ashen and ivory. He held out his specimen for Adie's inspection: a wildly shadowed flamenco dancer. Adie kinked her brows and looked at him for explanation.

You don't know it? She shook her head. You don't know it. I'm disappointed in you. El Jaleo? By Sargent? You do know Sargent, don't you?

Karl. Be nice.

I am being nice. You haven't seen mean yet. Here. Look here. He pressed his thumb to where she was supposed to look, further smudging her chances of making out the data.

She stared, feeling her old loupes kick in. She scoured the wall behind the dancer, the play of macabre shadow, obscured in a cheap print, rubbed out through years of shameless use by hands that probably prayed more often than they washed. Seeing anything there was a hopeless prospect, except for his insistence that she see it.

And then she saw. Painted on the painting's painted plaster wall: a replica of the first-made images.

He's quoting Altamira, Karl said. Just discovered by Sautuola and his little daughter. Written up the year before Sargent does the painting. A Spanish cave, you see. The painting's not really about the dancer. It's about the first-ever proof that we have to paint. Paint like we clap our hands. Took four more decades for the experts to accept the idea of Stone Age art. Nobody wanted to believe that these bison were the real thing. Except for painters, of course.

She looked at him, taken apart by what she saw.

Scan Sargent and stick him in your nature walk, he said. You'll get Altamira for free. He stared back at the image inside the image, shaking his head a little sadly. Think of it. All these centuries of greater realisms, more light, deeper psychological penetration, and the golem still never came alive. Paint: disowned by technology, discredited, until technology needed it again. And now, he said, shrugging at the Cavern walls, the water and the mud and the spark are finally coming together. Now we're at last threatening to pull it off…

Karl. Karl. Who was this man? Why aren't you an art history professor?

His face flushed, as if her words had slapped him. A hard, red hand slap. Flamenco.

Fuck you, too, doll.

Ebesen bundled up his yellowing gift and removed it from the negotiating table. He turned his threadbare trousers on her — pallid mandrill on its deathbed — and made for the exit.

Karl. Stop. Stop right now! I meant that as a compliment.

He turned in the doorway. His face twisted up, as if he were a non-native speaker, trying to remember "compliment," the shifty homonym, the false friend.

Help me with this, she said, waving to include all that was now invisible. It's the greatest game in the world. But it would be even more fun with someone who understood all the jokes.

His face came forward a nanometer. Jokes?

Ah. Sorry. I mean "allusions"

Ebesen suppressed a lip twitch. He studied the Cavern walls, empty now, their projections shut down. Bled of all electrons, they looked as blank and white as heavyweight bond. You '// help us out with the architectural fly-through, in return?